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Hey there - it's Brian 👋

A few months ago I spoke with a frustrated business owner who told me he “wasted $30,000 on marketing consultants.”

They focused on landing pages, content, and emails… too early.

I don’t want you to waste money on marketing, so let’s talk about your first steps to get customers.

We’ll cover why the business owner’s $30,000 was useless spend (and what you should do instead).

Stick to the end to choose the topic you want to learn next week.

Let’s make your business an outlier: 👇

How a tech consulting business spent $30k on marketing, then got no customers

Back in February, I joined a Zoom with a frustrated business owner.

He advised businesses on what tech they should use.

So here’s what happened: he’d have the first call with a potential customer and people seemed excited.

Their voice lit up, they asked about next steps, and seemed proactive about making things happen. They hang up, and then?

He just couldn’t get them to buy his service.

So I asked him what he did to solve the problem.

He exhaled and stared to the side while he gathered his thoughts.

“I just spent $30,000 on a marketing guru and I did everything he told me. But I’m still not getting people to buy.”

The guru re-worked his landing page, looked at his content, revised his emails. Did all marketing tactics that typical marketers do.

But here’s the problem:

His business isn’t ready to push marketing yet.

Here’s a visual to illustrate the point:

Imagine you’re standing in the middle of a city. You’re holding a megaphone. You yell into the megaphone. But no one seems to react to you.

So you turn up the volume. Still. No one comes to you.

So you tweak settings to make your voice clearer. Still. No one comes to you.

Turns out, it doesn’t matter how optimized the megaphone is. The words you yell into the megaphone need to get customers as excited about your solution as you are!

In this case, the megaphone is traditional marketing tactics:
• Landing pages
• Content
• Emails

You can make the perfect landing page. Craft the best content. But if the solution doesn’t solve a deep customer need, or if you’re not explaining it in a way that gives people their “ah-ha” moment, you won’t get customers.

The business owner spent $30k to make a louder megaphone when he really needed to frame his business in a way resonates with customers.

So what should you do instead?

Here’s your re-frame.

Don’t think:
“How do we change marketing tactics (landing pages, emails, content etc) to persuade as many customers to buy as possible?”

Instead think:
“How do we solve a customer’s problem so much better than their other options that they wonder how they’ve lived without us?”

Improving marketing tactics are the result of your business better solving customer problems.

When customers are excited about your solution as you are:
• They buy more often when they get to your landing page
• Share your message more when they see it on your socials
• Click more often on your emails, etc.

So here’s how you do it:

Here’s a high-level overview:
1) Create a theory on why your solution is the best way to solve one customer’s problem
2) Test the theory
3) Refine the theory until you see the results in marketing tactics (more sales from landing page, more engagement with your content etc)

First steps to create your theory:

The theory is the answer to this one question: how do you solve a specific pain for a specific customer better than anyone?

Now that’s a hard question to answer!

So to make it easier to answer I like to break that question down into a few parts and think about these parts individually:

Customer:
Who’s your target customer?
• Demographics: Age? Size of their business? Industry? Geography? Income?
• Aspirations: What dream do they want to achieve that your solution can promote? What pain do they have that you can cure?
• Why they buy: What’s their goal by using your solution?

Alternative options (to solve their pain):
• What other options do your customers have to solve their problem?
• How are they trying to solve their pain today?

How you’re their best option:
How do you solve their pain better than their alternatives (in a way your customer cares about)?

PAQs (Probably Asked Questions)

How do I test and refine the theory?

Use text-based social platforms to test your messaging. If it gets a lot of engagement take that as a sign that your core business is solving a painful problem that the customer cares about!

We won’t go into details in this issue, but when you’re ready to test your theory, I wrote a full walkthrough here.

Wait. Are you telling me to ignore marketing tactics?

I’m not saying ignore marketing tactics.

But I am saying to think about the 80/20 rule.

Framing your business to get customers ecstatic about your solution is 80% of the results. Re-structuring your landing page to increase conversion is the 20% of results.

Make customers excited about your solution (before you get a louder megaphone)

Don’t waste money optimizing your marketing tactics before customers are excited about your solution.

Instead using marketing tactics as results to test and refine your message.

Test a bunch of different ways that your customers get excited about your message and the marketing tactics are the outcome of a strong message.

When we discussed this with the consulting business owner and his eyes lit up. “I wish I knew this before I spent $30,000 on marketing.”

Boom! That’s it.

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See you next Thursday 👋

Brian
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🛠️ Outlier Links

The best links I found this week to help you grow and run your business:

How to structure equity for your business

How the founders of Dutchie might get kicked out (the app for cannabis business owners)

20 AI-based YC companies to watch.

How to stop overthinking your business decisions

How a business owner re-wrote his life story

How Pixar found what makes their business stand out

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